Reached

“Let us try.” Her voice is gentle, persuasive. “You can feel it, can’t you?” she asks, and now she sounds wistful. “The Otherlands are getting farther and farther away.”
    Everything goes quiet as we realize that Cassia’s right. I do feel the Otherlands receding for me, like the real world probably did for Lei and Ky when they went still. I feel everything slipping out of my grasp. I’ve followed the Pilot, Oker, and Cassia, but things didn’t go as I’d hoped. I thought I’d see a rebellion, find a cure, and have someone love me back.
    What if they all left? What if everyone else flew to the Otherlands or went still and I was here alone? Would I keep going? I would. I can’t seem to treat this life I have as anything but the only thing.
    “All right,” one of the guards says. “But hurry.”

    Anna has thought of everything. She’s brought equipment from the lab: a syringe, a mortar and pestle, clean water that’s been boiled and treated, and some of Oker’s base mixtures, with a list of the ingredients in each. “How did you know what we’d need?” I ask her.
    “I didn’t,” she says. “Tess and Noah did. They think it’s possible that Oker changed his mind. They’re not sure they believe you, but they’re not sure that they don’t, either.”
    “They
gave
all of this to you?” I ask.
    She nods. “But if anyone asks, we stole it. We don’t want to get them in trouble.”
    Cassia holds the flashlight for me while I scrub my hands with the sterilizing solution. I use the edge of the pestle to split the bulb in half. “It’s beautiful,” Cassia says.
    The inside of the bulb looks white and luminescent like the camassia bulbs. I grind it down, pulverizing the bulb until it’s a paste. Then Anna hands me a tube. Cassia watches and I find myself hesitating. Maybe it’s the memory of the night back in Oria when I traded for the blue tablets. I took blood when I shouldn’t have, and when I did, I implied promises that no one was in a position to keep. I did exactly what the Society and the Rising have done—I took advantage of people’s fears so that I could have something I wanted.
    Am I doing that again by making this cure? I look at Cassia. She trusts me. And she shouldn’t. I killed that boy in the Carving with the blue tablets. I didn’t do it on purpose, but if it wasn’t for me, he would never have had the tablets in the first place.
    I haven’t let myself think about this, even though I’ve known about it since we came in on the ship. Panic and bile rise together in my throat and I want to run away from what I’ve been asked to do. I can’t make a cure: I’ve made the wrong call too many times.
    “You know that I can’t guarantee that this will work,” I tell Cassia. “I’m not a pharmic. I might not put in the right amount, or there might be a reacting agent in the base that I don’t know about—”
    “There are a lot of ways it could go wrong,” she agrees. “I might not have found the right ingredient. But I think that I have. And I know you can make the cure.”
    “Why?” I ask.
    “You always come through for the people who need you,” she says, and her voice sounds sad. Like she knows this is going to cost me but she’s asking me to do it anyway and it breaks her heart.
    “Please,” she says. “One more time.”

CHAPTER 47
    CASSIA
    I nside the infirmary, Anna distracts the medics while I inject the cure into Ky’s line. It doesn’t take long; Xander told me how to do this. Before, I might have been afraid to try, but after seeing Xander compound a cure in a prison cell and Ky labor to breathe on through the stillness, there is no room left for my own fears.
    I cover the needle back up and slide it and the empty vial that held the cure into my sleeve, next to the poems I always carry. As I sit down next to Ky, I pick up the datapod. I pretend to keep sorting, though my eyes are really on Ky, watching, waiting. He is taking the biggest risk; it’s his veins the cure runs through. But we all have so much to lose.
    I have sometimes seen the three of us as separate, discrete points, and of course we are that, each individuals. But Ky and Xander and I all have to believe in one another to keep each other safe. In the end, I had to trust Xander to make a cure for Ky, and Ky trusted us to bring him back, and Xander trusted my sorting, and around and around we go, a circle, the three of us, connected, always, in the turning of days and the